Clal Biotechnology Industries (TASE: CBI) has announced that its portfolio company Elicio Therapeutics has started to be traded on Nasdaq through a merger with stock market shell company Angion. The merged company, traded as Elicio Therapeutics (ELTX) , saw its share price rise 81% on its first session, bringing its market cap to $158 million. When the merger was first announced, in January, Angion’s share price collapsed. It is now back at the level it was at before the announcement.
Clal Biotech has a 7.5% stake in Elicio, and currently has a market cap of NIS 94 million, which means that its Elicio stake alone represents about half its value. Clal Biotech also has small stakes in two of the three Israeli companies that have received marketing approval for drugs this year, Gamida Cell and MediWound, and it is waiting for approval for another drug, that of Biokine.
On Friday, Elicio, a developer of immunotherapies for the treatment of cancer, announced positive interim clinical data from the ongoing Phase 1 study of its lead asset, ELI-002, an investigational therapeutic cancer immunotherapy.
Elicio engineers proteins that appear frequently in cancerous cells but less frequently in healthy cells, and presents these to the immune system, together with an adjuvant (immune response booster) that brings the antigen directly to the lymph nodes, part of the body’s immune system.
In the past, immunotherapies for cancer have yielded fairly weak responses, but Elicio hopes that its immunotherapy will be more effective, thanks to the mechanism whereby the antigen is presented directly to the lymph nodes, and because its product tackles several proteins at once.
The company’s first product, ELI-002 2P, targets mutant KRAS-driven cancers. It says that the seven KRAS driver mutations targeted by the ELI-002 7P formulation are present in 25% of all solid tumors (that is, not blood cancers). The trial is designed to assess the safety, immunogenicity and antitumor activity of ELI-002 2P as a monotherapy in patients with mutant KRAS-driven tumors who are at high risk for relapse due to detection of MRD ( minimal residual disease) following standard surgery and chemotherapy.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on June 5, 2023.
© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd., 2023.